Alternative Comics: an Emerging Literature
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ALTERNATIVE COMICS Gilbert Hernandez, “Venus Tells It Like It Is!” Luba in America 167 (excerpt). © 2001 Gilbert Hernandez. Used with permission. ALTERNATIVE COMICS AN EMERGING LITERATURE Charles Hatfield UNIVERSITY PRESS OF MISSISSIPPI • JACKSON www.upress.state.ms.us The University Press of Mississippi is a member of the Association of American University Presses. Copyright © 2005 by University Press of Mississippi All rights reserved Manufactured in the United States of America First edition 2005 ϱ Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Hatfield, Charles, 1965– Alternative comics : an emerging literature / Charles Hatfield. — 1st ed. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 1-57806-718-9 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 1-57806-719-7 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Underground comic books, strips, etc.—United States—History and criticism. I. Title. PN6725.H39 2005 741.5'0973—dc22 2004025709 British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data available CONTENTS Acknowledgments vii Introduction ix Alternative Comics as an Emerging Literature 1 Comix, Comic Shops, and the Rise of 3 Alternative Comics, Post 1968 2 An Art of Tensions 32 The Otherness of Comics Reading 3 A Broader Canvas: Gilbert Hernandez’s Heartbreak Soup 68 4 “I made that whole thing up!” 108 The Problem of Authenticity in Autobiographical Comics 5 Irony and Self-Reflexivity in Autobiographical Comics 128 Two Case Studies 6 Whither the Graphic Novel? 152 Notes 164 Works Cited 169 Index 177 This page intentionally left blank ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Who can do this sort of thing alone? Not I. Thanks are due to many. For permission to include passages from my article, “Heartbreak Soup: The Interdependence of Theme and Form” (Inks 4:2, May 1997), the Ohio State University Press. For shepherding that article in the first place, Inks edi- tor Lucy Shelton Caswell. For the use of copyrighted material, the many artists and other rights- holders represented herein. Special thanks to the following, without whom my vague aspirations and tentative arguments could not have become a book: For guiding my first draft, my advisors at the University of Connecticut: Tom Roberts, Jean Marsden, and Tom Recchio. For information and images: Robert Beerbohm, Cécile Danehy, Gary Groth, John Morrow, Mark Nevins, Nhu-Hoa Nguyen, Nick Nguyen, Eric Reynolds, Michael Rhode, Patrick Rosenkranz, Randall Scott, R. Sikoryak, Tim Stroup, Brian Tucker, and the Comics Scholars’ Discussion List ([email protected]). For the corre- spondence, Gilbert Hernandez. For patience and counsel, Seetha Srinivasan and Walter Biggins. For design, Pete Halverson. For mentorship and friendship, Joseph (Rusty) Witek. For help of all sorts and friendship in all weathers, my fellow traveler Gene Kannenberg, Jr. For inspiration and conversation, my brother Scott. For unstinting moral and material support, my parents Ella and Jerry and my parents-in-law Ann and Bob. For the spark, Jack Kirby. Finally, and above all, to my own dear family: Michele, Coleman, and Nicholas. Norp! vii This page intentionally left blank INTRODUCTION ALTERNATIVE COMICS AS AN EMERGING LITERATURE This book is about comics. Specifically, it is about the growth, over the past thirty- odd years, of the American-style comic book and its loosely named offshoot, the graphic novel. In the English-reading world, the graphic novel in particular has become comics’ passport to recognition as a form of literature. Through this book I aim to cast light on both the necessary preconditions for and certain key exam- ples of this newly recognized literature, while unashamedly holding up as a backdrop the form’s populist, industrial, and frankly mercenary origins. In all, this book offers an entry—or rather several points of entry, including the socio- historical and the aesthetic—into that most fertile and bewildering sector of comic book culture, alternative comics. Alternative comics trace their origins to the underground “comix” move- ment of the 1960s and 1970s, which, jolted to life by the larger social upheavals of the era, departed from the familiar, anodyne conventions of the commercial comics mainstream and provided the initial impetus, the spark of possibility, for a new model of comics creation. The countercultural comix movement—scurrilous, wild and liberating, innovative, radical, and yet in some ways narrowly circumscribed—gave rise to the idea of comics as an acutely personal means of artistic exploration and self-expression. The aesthetic and economic example of the underground (as related in this book’s scene-setting first chapter) spurred the development of what eventually became a highly specialized commercial venue for comics: the comic book specialty shop, as it blossomed in the seventies and eighties. Within this specialized environment, the collision of “underground” distribution with mainstream comic book pub- lishing resulted in the growth of a hermetic yet economically advantageous market, one that catered to mainstream comic book fans but sustained, at its margins, the fevered sense of artistic possibility ignited by comix. ix INTRODUCTION “Alternative” comics, responding to that spirit, personal and at times boldly political themes. What’s sprang up within the specialty market during the more, alternative comics invited a new formalism, that 1970s, and more vitally and self-consciously from the is, an intensive reexamining of the formal tensions early 1980s onward, with the advent of iconoclastic inherent in comics (which are the focus of chapter 2). magazines such as Raw (1980–91) and Weirdo Indeed among the best of alternative comics are (1981–93), both rooted in underground comix, and many that have expanded the formal possibilities of Love & Rockets (1981–), deeply indebted to both comic art: out of a struggle with the conventions of underground and mainstream comics. These publi- serial publication, they have created breathtaking cations participated in a burgeoning movement of experiments in narrative structure and density. One so-called independent comics, but stood out even such experiment, Gilbert Hernandez’s recently col- within that context because of the animating influ- lected Central American epic Heartbreak Soup, is the ence of the undergrounds, which inspired them to flout subject of chapter 3. Unfolding on a vast social and the traditional comic book’s overwhelming emphasis temporal canvas, Heartbreak Soup tested the limits on comforting formula fiction. Even as the growing of comics form in order to broaden the artistic hori- sophistication of mainstream genre comics led to revi- zons and question the political responsibilities of sions of familiar formulas—leading, for instance, to comic books. a boom in darkly revisionist superheroes in the late Alternative comics, in addition, have enlarged the eighties—alternative comics skirted those shopworn comic book’s thematic repertoire by urging the explo- genres. They were the boot up the backside of comic ration of genres heretofore neglected in comics, such books, pushing and kicking against the calcified limi- as autobiography, reportage, and historical fiction. tations of the medium. Autobiography, especially, has been central to alter- Though driven by the example of underground native comics—whether in picaresque shaggy-dog comix, many alternative comics cultivated a more con- stories or in disarmingly, sometimes harrowingly, sidered approach to the art form, less dependent on frank uprootings of the psyche—and this has raised the outrageous gouging of taboos (though that con- knotty questions about truth and fictiveness, realism tinued too, of course) and more open to the possibility and fantasy, and the relationship between author and of extended and ambitious narratives. Alternative audience. These topics are essayed in chapters 4 comic creators of various pedigrees—from venera- and 5, which turn on the question of artistic self- ble comic book pioneer Will Eisner (1917–2005), to representation, arguing that self-reflexive and mock- underground veteran Art Spiegelman, to underground autobiographical devices paradoxically serve to latecomer Harvey Pekar, to such newcomers as Gilbert reinforce autobiography’s claims to truth. Chapter 5 and Jaime Hernandez—raised the intoxicating possibil- further argues that self-reflexive autobiographical ity that comics might be viewed not only as a crack- comics, far from devolving into navel-gazing passiv- ling, vital repository of supercharged Pop Art but also, ity, can become, indeed have become, a means for and crucially, as a literary form. radical cultural argument. From this reenvisioning of comics has sprung a vital In sum, this book shows how alternative comics if underappreciated literary movement—and it is to have breached the limits of the traditional comic this movement that the following book is devoted. book on every level, including packaging, publica- Crucial to this new movement were the rejection of tion, narrative form and thematic content. In the mainstream formulas; the exploration of (to comics) process they have spawned the vital yet often misun- new genres, as well as the revival, at times ironic derstood genre of the “graphic novel,” whose origins recasting, of genres long neglected; a diversification are addressed in chapter 1 (and whose constraints are of graphic style; a budding internationalism, as car- addressed, finally, in chapter 6). This genre, again, toonists learned from other cultures and other tradi- has become a passport to new recognition; indeed tions; and, especially,